1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a source driver, and more particularly, to a source driver that drives a display panel using display data and senses pixels of the display panel.
2. Related Art
A flat panel display device includes a source driver which provides a source signal to display data on a display panel. The source driver is configured to convert display data provided from an external source such as a timing controller into a source signal, and provide the source signal to the display panel.
The display panel may include an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) panel or LED (Light Emitting Diode) panel. The LCD panel displays a screen using an optical shutter operation of liquid crystal at each pixel, and the LED panel displays a screen by controlling light emission of the LED at each pixel.
For the LED panel, the source driver is configured to sense the characteristics of pixels in the LED panel. When the source driver provides sensing data corresponding to the pixel characteristics, a timing controller or application processor corrects display data using the sensing data. Then, the source driver drives the display panel using the corrected display data. Therefore, the image of the display panel can be expressed with a satisfactory quality, while the influence of the pixel characteristics is reduced.
For this operation, the source driver includes a sensor configured to sense the characteristic of a pixel and output a sensing signal and an analog-digital converter (ADC) configured to output sensing data. In the source driver, the ADC is implemented separately from a source driving module for processing display data. The source driving module includes digital circuits for processing display data and analog circuits for processing a source signal corresponding to the display data.
The source driving module, the sensor and the ADC are implemented at each channel of the source driver that outputs a source signal to the display panel. The source driver provides source signals to the display panel through a large number of channels. Therefore, the source driver fabricated as an integrated circuit includes ADCs corresponding to the number of channels.
Since the ADCs are implemented at the respective channels of the source driver, the ADCs occupy a large area in the source driver. Therefore, the ADCs serve as a factor that increases the area of the source driver fabricated as an integrated circuit.
In other words, the ADCs occupy a large area in the integrated circuit. Thus, the source driver has difficulties in efficiently designing an internal circuit.